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‘The park should never have closed’

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The last years of the area’s only amusement park weren’t much fun, its former owner said.

Joseph Filoromo, who purchased Angela Park in 1985 from the Barletta family, said a combination of rain, insurance rates and some bad banking advice combined to end the roller-coaster ride that was his tenure at the facility that opened in 1957.

“The park, should have never closed,” Filoromo said in a recent interview. “It had everything going for it.”

Filoromo — who at 33 years old took over park operations — said its location, near the intersection of interstates 80 and 81, was one of its biggest assets. And the condition of the facility was great, he said.

Mirthmaster, the corporation Filoromo formed with his mother, purchased the park for $1.2 million. He said it was appraised at almost

$2 million.

“We brought the park and had the mortgage and more than $400,000 in escrow,” he said. The escrow fund, he said, was money that would keep the park going in the event of a bad year.

“In 1985, there was an insurance crisis,” he said. “And the next year it got worse.”

Filoromo said rising premiums put a dent in his financial condition. In 1987, he said, insurance costs skyrocketed to $45,000 from just $7,000 three years earlier.

Then the rains came.

“It rained almost every weekend in 1986,” he said.

The park couldn’t open when it was wet, and that put more of a downward spin on his cash flow.

He said he lost more money when area companies started dumping their special promotion days and picnics.

“We were really in a pinch,” Filoromo said. “I was behind on the mortgage payments, and the bank told me to use the escrow.”

Filoromo said he needed about $50,000 of the money to get his payments up to date.

“I was going to pay enough to make it to the next season,” he said. “But then, the bank changed its mind.”

At that point, he said, the bank said the rainy-day escrow funds was to be used only for collateral.

“I had almost half a million dollars to use, and now I couldn’t.” Filoromo said.

Not being able to do that, he said, forced Mirthmaster into bankruptcy and closed the gates on the park.

Debt on the park was approaching $1.4 million and growing at a rate of more than $400 a day.

Had he been able to wait another year, Filoromo said chances were good that he could’ve have turned things around.

“The next season, the weather was great,” he said.

The former owner said that when he owned the park, he had an option to purchase about 100 acres in the area of what was the baseball field that would have made the park nearly four times larger that its original 33-acre site.

He said he envisioned installing water rides in that area.

Filoromo, who lived on the property when he owned the park, said he did as much as he could to keep it open.

“I was married to that park,” he said. “I’d be outside at four in the morning, fixing things, I ran off a lot of girlfriends.”

Filoromo said safety was one of his biggest concerns.

“I wouldn’t compromise public safety,” he said. “I had rides closed down because I knew they needed some things done.”

He said it was that concern for safety that steered him into his latest career as supervisor in the state Department of Agriculture’s Amusement Ride Inspection Division.

“On the day of the auction the director of the rides in the (Gov. Robert) Casey administration kept following me around, asking me to take a job,” he said. “So I decided to give it a try.”

Looking back, Filoromo said starting a park like Angela these days is almost impossible.

“That was one of the last family-run amusement parks,” he said. “To go into that business today, you’d have to be a big corporation.”

Nevertheless, he said that in his time as the owner, he did everything in his power to keep the site open.

He said he often thinks about what could’ve been.

“It’s just horrible,” he said. “There’s so much we were trying to do, and they were running me out.”

This story originally appeared in the May/June 2007 edition of Senior Scene.

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